New college grads are doing better than the vibes suggest

There are many ways to bomb a college commencement speech.

You can tell everyone you composed the talk while high on ayahuasca, like Chris Pan at Ohio State. You can deliver the entirety of your speech in the voices of your incredibly annoying cartoon characters, like Tom Kenny and Bill Fagerbakke at the University of Vermont. You can even, like my graduation speaker in 2001, admonish the graduating class for depending too much on their parents and generally being an ungrateful lot, before later being convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault and undergoing a dramatic fall from grace. (Yes, that was none other than Bill Cosby, whose convictions were later overturned.)

But the surest way to turn your graduate audience hostile in 2026 is to refer positively to AI, as speakers ranging from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the University of Arizona to real estate executive Gloria Caulfield at the University of Central Florida to record label honcho Scott Borchetta at Middle Tennessee State University discovered. And that’s because AI has — not unreasonably — become the symbol of growing fears that a college degree is no longer as valuable as it once was, and that today’s college grads are uniquely screwed. (The only speaker I could find whose comments on AI were well received was The Daily Show’s Ronny Chieng at Harvard, probably because they included the line: “fuck AI, fuck AI, fuck AI.”)

In a late-2025 NBC News poll, 63 percent of voters said a college degree isn’t worth it, against just 33 percent who said it was. A Gallup poll found that the share of Americans who say college is “very important” had fallen to 35 percent in 2025, a huge drop from 75 percent in 2010. And that pessimism has real grounding. Recent graduates ages 22 to 27 had an unemployment rate of about 5.7 percent in early 2026, above the national average of 4.3 percent. Hiring has slowed to the lowest rate outside the pandemic since 2014, while entry-level postings have fallen roughly 35 percent over the past 18 months.

So there’s no doubt that 2026 will be a rough launch for new college grads. But a rough launch doesn’t mean a rough life, and while the longer-term impact of AI is unknowable, it’s far from the worst time even in recent memory to graduate into the workforce. The data still says, for most graduates, a college degree is more than worth the investment.

The vibes out there for college grads are not good. But when the bad vibes are outpacing the actual reality, that qualifies as qualified good news.

Let’s start with the number the college panic ignores. In 2025, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York asked the question “Is college still worth it?” and came back with a very specific answer: Yes — to the tune of 12.5 percent.

That was the median return on investment in a college degree, after accounting for the cost of tuition and the amount lost by not spending those years working. College graduates in recent years have earned a median of around $80,000 a year, compared to around $47,000 a year for high school graduates. Government data in 2024 put median weekly earnings for workers with a bachelor’s degree at $1,543, compared with $930 for workers with only a high school diploma — about 66 percent more. And while it’s true that the growth of this premium has largely flattened over the past two decades, after roughly doubling between 1980 and 2000, it hasn’t disappeared. Graduating from college, even in 2026, still puts you on a better path than skipping it.

It’s telling that when you shift from the abstract idea of college to the value of individual degrees, the vibes change. Asked about their own degree, according to a 2026 Gallup poll, about 80 percent of bachelor’s graduates call it critical or important to their careers, while 71 percent say they landed a good job within six months. It’s a bit like the perennial attitude toward Congress: People hate the institution and yet tend to rate their own representatives highly. Abstract views are influenced by the deluge of content about the crisis of college, while individual views are influenced by what is actually happening to people.

Speaking as a proud member of the college class of 2001, I can tell you that 2026 is far from the first year when it was tough to graduate into the workforce. My friends one year above me in college entered an economy that had an astoundingly low unemployment rate of 1.4 to 1.7 percent for college grads ages 25 to 34, while real hourly wages for young college graduates had grown at 3 percent a year between 1995 and 2000. My classmates assumed we were headed for the same golden outcome.

“Psych!”, as we used to say back then. By the spring of 2001, the dot-com crash was in full effect, wiping out startups and jobs. More than a few people I knew had lined up lucrative starting jobs at investment banks and consulting businesses, only to have those gigs rescinded as they were preparing to receive their diplomas. (I cleverly avoided this by never getting those offers in the first place and instead entering the thriving field of journalism.) By December 2001, in the aftermath of 9/11, the unemployment rate for college grads ages 25 to 34 had jumped to 4 percent.

The class of 2010 had it even worse — recent college grads had a 7 percent unemployment rate. But though both the classes of 2001 and 2010 experienced what economists call “recession scarring” that had lasting effects on their income, those scars largely, though not completely, faded as time passed and the economy improved. The lesson? You can’t control when you graduate college, but you can largely control whether you graduate college at all — and finishing school is likely to still benefit you over the long term.

It’s true that the class of 2026 is facing an extra layer of uncertainty: the fear that AI is eating away at the bottom rung of the career ladder before graduates can reach it. Goldman Sachs finds unemployment among 20- to 30-year-olds in tech-exposed roles is up nearly 3 percentage points since early 2025, while research from Stanford has counted a roughly 20 percent drop in employment for young software developers in highly automatable jobs.

But every time you think the case has been made that AI is causing a jobpocalypse, new data complicates the picture. Vanguard reports that employment in highly AI-exposed occupations rose 1.7 percent between 2023 and 2025, while a Federal Reserve study this year of more than a million firms found no clear connection between adopting AI and posting fewer jobs so far. At the moment, hiring problems have more to do with a cautious, high-interest-rate economy. And employer hiring plans for the class of 2026 are actually being revised upward — not the move you make while deleting the entry level.

None of this data means that college bet is a sure thing for everyone. Tracking by the Burning Glass Institute and Strada finds that 52 percent of graduates are underemployed a year out, and 45 percent are underemployed a decade later. A college grad who takes a first job that doesn’t require a degree is 3.5 times more likely to be underemployed 10 years on. For that group, the earnings premium over a high school grad shrinks to about 25 percent — roughly the same as a college dropout.

Outcomes are also influenced by what a graduate chooses to study: Underemployment runs under 10 percent for nursing graduates and above 65 percent for criminal justice majors. (I realize telling someone who just claimed their diploma that maybe they should have picked a different major is not exactly actionable advice.) And the financing has gotten tougher — for Gen Z, it cost 32 percent of the typical American family’s annual income to pay for one year at a state university in 2021, compared to mid-20s for Gen X in the 1990s and 15 percent for Boomers in 1975.

But generational comparisons obscure as well. When people say college doesn’t pay like it used to, they may not realize they’re comparing against a past when a far smaller and more homogenous slice of Americans got their degree: Among 25- to 29-year-olds, the share holding a bachelor’s has roughly doubled between 1980 and 2021, from about a fifth to nearly two in five. That much larger and more varied pool of graduates skews the individual outcomes, even if the average largely holds up.

So what would I tell the class of 2026 if someone were misguided enough to put me on the dais? Mustering my best commencement-grade metaphors, I’d tell them that, yes, they are graduating into a sea of troubles, but that they are far from the first academic sailors to make such a voyage, and that the diploma they hold is still the most oceanworthy raft they can find. (Can you tell I was an English major?) And if I were so bold as to mention AI, I’d lean more Ronny Chieng than Eric Schmidt.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!